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Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle, by Lewis Lapham (Verso, 371 pp., $24.95)

FROM his penthouse suite in the Hotel America, where the country’s troublesome rabble are confined to the television screen and no issue is so urgent that it cannot be encapsulated in a facile irony, the impeccably attired Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, descends to the lobby at periodic intervals to observe the mysterious behavior of his social inferiors. What awful people he finds loitering about the premises! How is it possible, he wonders, that so many of the uncouth and the unscrupulous have gained admittance to his Hotel America?

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Hilton Kramer

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Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siècle, by Lewis Lapham (Verso, 371 pp., $24.95)

FROM his penthouse suite in the Hotel America, where the country’s troublesome rabble are confined to the television screen and no issue is so urgent that it cannot be encapsulated in a facile irony, the impeccably attired Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, descends to the lobby at periodic intervals to observe the mysterious behavior of his social inferiors. What awful people he finds loitering about the premises! How is it possible, he wonders, that so many of the uncouth and the unscrupulous have gained admittance to his Hotel America?